(CNN)—In the Bible, God spoke directly to Abraham. He spoke directly to Moses. He spoke directly to Job. But to your neighbor down the street?

Most people reading the ancient scriptures understand these accounts of hearing God’s voice as miracles that really did happen but no longer take place today, or maybe as folkloric flourishes to ancient stories. Even Christians who believe that miracles can be an everyday affair can hesitate when someone tells them they heard God speak audibly. There’s an old joke: When you talk to God, we call it prayer, but when God talks to you, we call it schizophrenia.

Except that usually it’s not.

Hearing a voice when alone, or seeing something no one else can see, is pretty common. At least one in 10 people will say they’ve had such an experience if you ask them bluntly. About four in 10 say they have unusual perceptual experiences between sleep and awareness if you interview them about their sleeping habits.

And if you ask them in a way that allows them to admit they made a mistake, the rate climbs even higher. By contrast, schizophrenia, the most debilitating of all mental disorders, is pretty rare. Only about one in 100 people can be diagnosed with the disorder.

Moreover, the patterns are quite distinct. People with schizophrenia who hear voices hear them frequently. They often hear them throughout the day, sometimes like a rain of sound, or a relentless hammer. They hear not only sentences, but paragraphs: words upon words upon words. What the voices say is horrid—insults, sneers and contemptuous jibes. “Dirty. You’re dirty.” “Stupid slut.” “You should’ve gone under the bus, not into it.”

That was not what Abraham, Moses and Job experienced, even when God was at his most fierce.

For the last 10 years, I have been doing anthropological and psychological research among experientially oriented evangelicals, the sort of people who seek a personal relationship with God and who expect that God will talk back. For most of them, most of the time, God talks back in a quiet voice they hear inside their minds, or through images that come to mind during prayer. But many of them also reported sensory experiences of God. They say God touched their shoulder, or that he spoke up from the back seat and said, in a way they heard with their ears, that he loved them. Indeed, in 1999, Gallup reported that 23% of all Americans had heard a voice or seen a vision in response to prayer.

These experiences were brief: at the most, a few words or short sentences. They were rare. Those who reported them reported no more than a few of them, if that. These experiences were not distressing, although they were often disconcerting and always startling. On the contrary, these experiences often made people feel more intimate with God, and more deeply loved.

In fact, my research has found that these unusual sensory experiences are more common among those who pray in a way that uses the imagination—for example, when prayer involves talking to God in your mind. The unusual sensory experiences were not, in general, associated with mental illness (we checked).

They were more common among those who felt comfortable getting caught up in their imaginations. They were also more common among those who prayed for longer periods. Prayer involves paying attention to words and images in the mind, and giving them significance. There is something about the skilled practice of paying attention to the mind in this way that shifts—just a little bit—the way we judge what is real.

Yet even many of these Christians, who wanted so badly to have a back-and-forth relationship with God, were a little hesitant to talk about hearing God speak with their ears. For all the biblical examples of hearing God speak audibly, they doubt. Augustine reports that when he was in extremis, sobbing at the foot of that fig tree, he heard a voice say, “Take it and read.” He picked up the scripture and converted. When the Christians I know heard God speak audibly, it often flitted across their minds that they were crazy.

In his new book, "Hallucinations," the noted neurologist Oliver Sacks tells his own story about a hallucinatory experience that changed his life. He took a hearty dose of methamphetamines as a young doctor, and settled down with a 19th century book on migraines. He loved the book, with its detailed observation and its humanity. He wanted more. As he was casting around in his mind for someone who could write more that he could read, a loud internal voice told him “You silly bugger” that it was he. So he began to write. He never took drugs again.

Now, Sacks does not recommend that anyone take drugs like that. He thinks that what he did was dangerous and he thinks he was lucky to have survived.

What interests me, however, is that he allowed himself to trust the voice because the voice was good. There’s a distinction between voices associated with psychiatric illness (often bad) and those (often good) that are found in the so-called normal population. There’s another distinction between those who choose to listen to a voice, if the advice it gives is good, and those who do not. When people like Sacks hear a voice that gives them good advice, the experience can transform them.

This is important, because often, when voices are discussed in the media or around the kitchen table, the voices are treated unequivocally as symptoms of madness. And of course, voice-hearing is associated with psychiatric illness.

But not all the time. In fact, not most of the time.

About a third of the people I interviewed carefully at the church where I did research reported an unusual sensory experience they associated with God. While they found these experiences startling, they also found them deeply reassuring.

Science cannot tell us whether God generated the voice that Abraham or Augustine heard. But it can tell us that many of these events are normal, part of the fabric of human perception. History tells us that those experiences enable people to choose paths they should choose, but for various reasons they hesitate to choose.

When the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. sat at his kitchen table, in the winter of 1956, terrified by the fear of what might happen to him and his family during the Montgomery bus boycott, he said he heard the voice of Jesus promising, “I will be with you.” He went forward.

Voices may form part of human suffering. They also may inspire human greatness.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of TM Luhrmann.

you can talk and talk and talk but face it you're dead wrong guy. sorry you feel like christianity or god rejected you.

February 5, 2014 at 2:27 pm |

Gaylord Mcgaha

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January 9, 2014 at 10:04 pm |

LeveL 1001

yeh that was a pretty good read.

January 11, 2014 at 1:50 am |

Captain Obvious

1 john 4:1-3
Beloved, many false prophets have gone out into the world. So do not believe or trust every spirit, but test the spirits to see if they are from God.
This is how you can recognise God’s Spirit:
Every spirit who confesses that Jesus Christ came to earth as a human [ in the flesh] is from God. And every spirit who refuses to say this about Jesus [does not confess or acknowledge Jesus] is not from God.
It is the spirit of the enemy of Christ [ antichrist], which you have heard is coming, and now he is already in the world.

December 28, 2013 at 4:02 pm |

Cpt. Obvious

Will god say "Well done, good and faithful servant" when he considers the action of stealing another person's nickname on this blog?

I take the bible as what it is, an ancient book, written by sheep herders; words on paper and nothing more.

"If a man lies with a male as with a women, both of them shall be put to death for their abominable deed; they have forfeited their lives." (Leviticus 20:13 NAB)

So go ahead and take your bible seriously, I dare you, hell I double dare you.

I don't even understand your question regarding MLK, since it reads as gibberish.

December 29, 2013 at 1:45 pm |

LeveL 1001

You said christians are trapped in an ancient ignorant world. So do u think MLK Jr was trapped in an ancient world? Btw that was a good Leviticus verse id take it literally and seriously i dont see the big deal is.
I guess some of them were shepherds what do u think about Daniel and John and the messiah Christ himself? Just curious

Was MLK a historian, a physicist, biologist? What about MLK is relevant to the truth of the conversation?

MLK might have been a great leader for his people, and he might have been a great man, but that doesn't mean that he was an expert on the subject of biblical studies or any other relevant subject like evolution or physics.

For all we know, he might have used religion as a catalyst to unite the different people on his cause.

I can tell you one thing with 99.9% certainty, if he was born in Africa or ANY other Islamic country, He would NOT have been a christian, he would have been a Muslim.

Daniel is a myth and his visions an impossibility, John is an attributed name by the Church to some of the letters that make up the bible and Jesus, unless you can provide credible evidence, is nothing more than a myth, an amalgamation of different religions and created as the last messiah, before Mohamed came along – oops and NEVER existed.

So wait, you take the Leviticus verse seriously and literally and don't see what the big deal is? WOW!

Then go ahead and take my dare.

Yes MLK made progress, I never denied that, but that has NOTHING to do with the subject.

MOST Christians don't believe in evolution, they fight science and they have always slowed progress. They have BURNED scientists alive in the past, Mr. Bruno for example, and have made books illegal for 300 years that would have allowed the man to progress.

December 29, 2013 at 11:20 pm |

LeveL 1001

Pretty good answers. Long and extra and not to the point but pretty good explanation. I still dont see how christians are trapped in the past. MLK Jr was a christian and he seemed to progress the nation on... racial issues at least. Did u think the Christ the man is a myth?

Your welcomed. I hope you keep learning about the subject and make an informed decision.

Knowledge and facts don't need faith.

December 30, 2013 at 2:14 pm |

LeveL 1001

thanks again, but just to be clear im not in agreeing with you, ive made my decision a 4 years ago, im christian (not catholic and not evangelist). but ive always had the faith and i love it. i just wanted to know your rebuttals, points of views, and conclusions, to learn about other humans and make me stronger. but I give u major respect for speaking your mind intelligently.

Very disappointing to hear that a human will endeavor on a quest for information with their minds already made up.

A very futile endeavor indeed.

December 30, 2013 at 2:30 pm |

LeveL 1001

you're still dead wrong, face it guy. sorry you feel like christianity or god rejected you.

February 5, 2014 at 2:28 pm |

LeveL 1001

im not on a quest for information lol. whats wrong with having your mind made up? i like reading and talking with people. im sad you feel that way about christians though. what was your goal here anyways? to ridicule? my goal here was to read what people think. see what you would say about the holy book and how you felt about MLK Jr, and if you believed all the characters in the bible were myths etc.

how do you feel about the holy ghost/holy spirit?

i already know what i think/believe/know, and being curious i like to see what other ppl think and what conclusions in life they have come too.

I know you are christian, I'm making an obvious comparison between the two. Why would that be eating me up?

Your religion claims to be monotheistic, yet it incorporates three deities into one. On top of that, one of those deities sits to the side of another, while the main deity claims to have sent himself thru a virgin as a human form to return to himself but sitting next to himself after a ritualistic and bloody human sacrifice.

What do you think I think of that? What else can anyone with a reasoning mind make of such a thing?

What you call the ghost or spirit of your god, is nothing more than yourself being reflect back to you by your fears.

You are projecting an idea in desperation to your own mind as an escape from reality.

If you truly want to live this life as who you really are, go seek professional help. This is NOT an insult, the richest people on this planet have a REGULAR psychologist that they turn to ALL THE TIME because the world is TO COMPLICATED for anyone to deal with it on their own.

So stop lying to yourself, and go get the help you deserve. You owe it to yourself.

December 30, 2013 at 3:13 pm |

LeveL 1001

@ Dorian, you just type alot of trash, I'm glad I asked you many questions to see how deep your rubbish goes, lol. You dug yourself a hole talking about the holy spirit like that. well you may have sealed your fate, and btw you're dead wrong on the whole issue. You will go to Hell if you reject Christ you idiot. Stop lying to yourself. May G-d have mercy on you you miserable beast.

February 4, 2014 at 1:25 am |

Dorian

Coming from someone like you, with the mind of a child and the knowledge of an ameba, I'll take it as a compliment.

February 4, 2014 at 1:34 am |

LeveL 1001

you're still dead wrong, face it buddy. sorry you feel like christianity or god rejected you.

The CNN Belief Blog covers the faith angles of the day's biggest stories, from breaking news to politics to entertainment, fostering a global conversation about the role of religion and belief in readers' lives. It's edited by CNN's Daniel Burke with contributions from Eric Marrapodi and CNN's worldwide news gathering team.